How to write a book in LaTeX

Question

I have taken a look at other questions, and I don't see any answer to my question. If this is a duplicate for some question I haven't seen, feel free to comment.

I am an experienced TeX user, I've been writing with TeX for about 3-4 years now. I am pretty good with TikZ too. The problem is, all that I have learned comes from one of my teachers that gave me packages so that I don't have much to worry about, and I never got in the technical stuff on my own (or at least never understood a thing of it).

I want to write a book, so I need to be able to deal with stuff like margins, labels, pagination, separating my TeX files into many files so that I don't have to compile the whole book each time I wanna remove/add a comma, etc. I am looking—not for a user manual that states what all commands do like a dictionary, because I know there are plenty out there and I have some—but rather like an introduction to using a book class, with examples and such. If you know what I'm talking about, the PGF-TikZ pdf is a great example of a such PDF ; it describes commands, yes, but there are plenty of examples and little commands are usually detailed while constructing a bigger example.

Answer 1

Well, from my own experience I would suggest that you first focus on the content, then again on the content and after that, on the content. At the very end, you might play around with different styles and packages to modify the appearence of your text. With a long term project like a book it is very important to get not too much distracted by unimportant things.

In the end, there might be a publisher who insists on a particular style/class anyway. Many publishers in science have their own classes which one is obliged to use. But unless you have a complete manuscript, it is very unlikely that a publisher will agree on publishing your text. So first: just write the stuff with some standard class (the ordinary book class...) and finish the text.

EDIT: OK, maybe this was not too helpful, so here is some more addition:

1. In a first step you should ask yourself what kind of audience you would like to address. This will determine the way you write very much. In math you want a textbook with exercises and detailed proofs or more a monograph with extended bibliography etc...

2. Structure and order you thoughts. Make a table of contents with preliminary summaries of all the sections/subsections. I used to do this in a separate tex-file "plan.tex" or so, which was also subject to change (quite a lot) during the writing.

3. Be consistent with notation. Before you write, you should fix some notational issues: in particular in math, it is very important that you use the same symbols throughout, use symbols familiar to others, etc.

4. Making a main.tex with inputs/includes of the chapters which input the sections etc. Here the style/class is not yet essential, it should just support a command like "\chapter" :)

5. Fill you files with content. This will take 99% of your time

6. Check with some publisher etc where you want to place your work. They will provide a style-file or tell you which one of the standard ones is traditionally used with them. If they want to publish it at all.

7. Then, and this takes not much work at all compared to the rest, adapt your sources to the class/style needed, fix the hboxes, massage the bibliography, scale the pictures appropriately etc.

So I hope that this is a reasonable workflow. It will be point 5 which really requires the most attention and work, the rest is cosmetics :)

Answer 2

If you're already familiar with (LaTeX), then I would heartily recommend just starting to write (as Yiannis says), but with the memoir class (which you can read up on in parallel as the work evolves), rather than book.

Memoir includes two really good manuals: The Memoir Class for Configurable Typesetting is a combination of good typography and how-to-do-it, and A Few Notes on Book Design which goes into a bit of history and underlying principles.

I've been a memoir user for around seven years now. There was an initial learning curve (but only because I was already demanding more tweaks than might be proper!), but it has repaid the investment many times over, and, today, apart from books, the only thing I don't use memoir for is presentations.

The only other recommendations I would make are these: as it's a "new project", go with LuaLaTeX, BibLaTeX, fontspec for font tweaking, and 100% unicode.

Answer 3

In terms of completeness and detail the best information is still in books rather than publications on the web. Personally I think The LaTeX Companion Second Edition  by Frank Mittelbach et al  is still the best place to start, especially for a new book project, although newer books are available.

My recommendation though since you already know a bit about LaTeX is to just start writing immediately, using the standard book class and not worrying too much about presentation. When you are in about Chapter 5, you can start experimenting with different classes or even writing your own. The book class virtually guarantees compatibility with any other class.

Answer 4

Separation of presentation and content

LaTeX is based on the idea that authors should be able to focus on the content of what they are writing without being distracted by its visual presentation. In preparing a LaTeX document, the author specifies the logical structure using familiar concepts such as chapter, section, table, figure, etc., and lets the LaTeX system worry about the presentation of these structures. It therefore encourages the separation of layout from content while still allowing manual typesetting adjustments where needed.

(from wikipedia)

I agree with a lot of things described by other contributors but I think if you want to avoid a waste of time, you need to prepare the separation of presentation and content.

All the good classes give sectioning tools. So you can start working with chapter, section etc. but if you want write a math book, you need theorem, definition, remark , examples, etc.

Some classes give you these tools but it's easy to create them. In a first time, these environments can do nothing : for example

 \newenvironment{theo}{My theorem :}{\par} 

 \begin{theo}
      All I have to do it's to use fake environment
  \end{theo} 

Then you need to create some macros (fake or empty macros) \newword \GreatPerson \ImportantWord or FirstDef you can define these macros like this:

\newcommand{\ImportantWord}[1]{#1}
 \newcommand{\GreatPerson}[1]{#1} 

 \ImportantWord{Geometry}
 \GreatPerson{Pythagore}

I forgot two important macros : \number and \unit. It's not important to choice directly "sinunitx" or "numprint" but you need to prepare the formatting of the numbers and unities. If you don't do that immediately, it's a waste of time to format the numbers at the end.

And you need to prepare the index and the bibliography. I think is very useful to prepare the index. In a first time you can use \index{thisword} but it can be useful to have some specific macros. You can look at the file Mathmode.ltx of Herbert Voss to get some ideas. You can find something like

  \def\tIndex#1{\index{#1@{\UrlFont\texttt{#1}}}}
  \def\cIndex#1{\index{#1@\CMD{#1}}} 

But in a first time, fake macros are fine !

Now you can start writing "immediately", using the standard book class and not worrying too much about presentation.

With environments and macros you are ready to finish the presentation like you want. Without these environments and macros, it's difficult to find something in your text.

Answer 5

In oppostion to other answers here I really recommend to spent a few days to prepare a framework in LaTeX.

Think twice about your workflow and the technical tools you need.

For example, how will you leave comments and annotations for yourself? How do you delete them? I usually write them into the margin in small red print and use the marginfix package. To this end I define a new command, simply something like \Anm (German abbrev. for comment).

Will you need a comparison between versions? Or even different versions? Take a day to become familiar with a version system. I'm using git and to build comparisons between versions the script latexdiff-git. A version system may help a lot in case you get stuck and you need to return to a earlier version.

I prefer scrbook to memoir, because KOMA-script adopts the european way to typeset, and for many more reasons.

To speed up compilation have a look at latexmk.

And the most important thing: Employ \label and \ref as much as possible for any reference. Learn how to use Zotero or whatever way to manage your bibliography! Probably you should prefer BibLaTeX to BibTeX.

Which encoding? utf-8 probably, but however, do not mix encondings, choose one which is sufficient for all kind of texts in your book.

Don't use LuaTeX or XeTeX for a serious project. LuaTeX simply is buggy and slow. pdfTeX still is the engine, for many years. There hasn't been a new LuaTeX version for a year!

How do you handle updates / upgrades of texlive or MikTeX? The former maintainer of the Libertine package one day published an incompatible update and after receiving some unfriendly comments withdrew from maintaining the package, leaving me behind with broken files. So it would be advisable to have way to test your monthly update before you encounter a lot of stress.

How will you backup your work consistently, inhouse and somewhere else?

I could go on writing, but I think you got the message: Think intensly on each step of your workflow at the beginning.

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Edit due to comments below:

As user pmav99 argues, if you use non latin fonts, XeTeX is very helpfull. I agree with that; I was too narrow minded on the disadvantages of XeTeX. There surely are advantages which may justify using XeTeX »in a serious project«.